SAN FRANCISCO—Put an experienced
switcher operator in front of a sprawling
professional broadcast switcher—even in
the dark—and odds are he or she could still
pull together a show.

That testifies to the solid, steadfast design
of a traditional production switcher. Buttons
here, fader bar there.

What the next five years holds, however,
is not as clear. The dominance of standard
tactile controls on the modern-
day production switcher
may begin to waver in favor
of trends like integrated
touchscreens and standalone
tablet apps, whose
ease-of-use features are being
considered for their
speed and agility.

The right balance seems
to be a machine that smartly
combines speed and agility
while tapping into an operator’s
skill and experience. So what does this
next-generation switcher look like?

PART ART, PART SCIENCE
What’s clear is that the physical design of
a professional production switcher is part art
and part science, a methodical and precise
process that takes into account speed, intuitiveness
and—more recently—an operator’s
creative capabilities.

GV Director Nonlinear Live Production System

“One of the overwhelming responses that
we got was for a solution that allows more
creative operators to go out and produce
high-quality productions,” said David Sabine
vice president of the switcher product line
at Grass Valley in San Francisco. “[They wanted
to do it] without the traditional need for
technical operators to convert those creative
desires into a technically produced output.”

That meant rethinking the design and
layout process of the company’s GV Director
switcher. “We wanted to examine some
of these long-held workflows in the terms of
modern technology and how to solve things
with a fresh set of eyes,” said David Griggs,
embedded software manager for switchers
at Grass Valley. The company looked at the
evolution that has taken place in post production
design, and built the Director with
a smart control surface with touchscreen
panel.

Workflow was the starting point, he said.

“When you think about live production
in its simplest form, it’s simply a building
block to create an output,”
Griggs said. “In a
traditional switcher you
have some technical and
specific resources to do
that. We wanted to create
a ‘PowerPoint’ [solution]
for live production—an
ability to drag-and-drop
live elements—simply by
thinking of those as layers
and layering on top,
and it’s been surprisingly
intuitive.”

There’s also a call from smaller production
houses to pull off professional-looking
events, regardless of the size of the event,
Griggs said. “There is an increased desire to
find a smarter way to produce a higher-quality
production,” he said.

HYBRID SOLUTIONS
Others, however, point to the success of
traditional tactile control panels.

“My general sense is that the tactile properties
of physical switches on a control surface
remain essential for multicamera and
multisource complex live production,” said
Karl Paulsen, CTO of systems integrator
Diversified Systems and columnist for TV
Technology. “That may be changing for less
high-profile systems.”

Virtual panels may find a foothold, he
said, in cases where managers seem to support
the flexibility of mini-control systems
that can be adapted based upon the environment
they work in.

That’s what Steve Ellis, CEO of Broadcast
Pix in Billerica, Mass., has seen as well. “At
one point in my career, I ran a fairly large post
house and we had switchers in every room.
That industry doesn’t exist anymore.” Ellis
sees the production switcher evolving into
a hybrid of solutions that takes into account
what’s happening in the real world. “Production
teams are getting smaller,” he said. “So
we’re all trying to create solutions that allow
[operators] to automate the process.”

Broadcast Pix’s foray into the touchscreen
space includes the iPixPanel app for
the iPad, which can control the Flint, Mica or
Granite integrated production solutions. Via
an iPad, the system can switch cameras, add
key layers, control a CG or operate a robotic
camera via a virtual joystick. The iPixPanel
can be used as the sole control surface or
as a portable panel. “A lot of people prefer
the old switcher, the keys and the physical
switcher,” Ellis said. “But part of that was
because of the complexity of the situation.
Today you can do very complex types of
productions and do it with a touch screen.”

There is also continued interest in PC-like
systems with built-in switcher panels that are
mouse- or touch-driven, as well as increased
use of a combination tablet for switching
and reviewing dailies in a of production studio,
Paulsen said. Production switchers have
been a fairly traditional work surface since
the beginning of time, and have stayed fairly
basic in terms of how to select inputs and
outputs, how to call up a key and how to do
a mix,” said Jay Shinn, account manager for
For-A in Ft. Lee, N.J. “But that’s beginning to
change as some of the display technologies
become more affordable and as the customer
base evolves as well.”

Broadcast Pix iPix touchscreen panel

That customer base may be the tipping
point on how quickly these technologies
evolve. “The user community is used to a
certain style of operating, and most users
like the traditional panel,” Shinn said. “Some
are resistant to changing how the workflow
is occurring, but we are beginning to
see a new generation of operators that are
more willing to take on new technology to
take into their production workflow.”

This spring For-A announced a new feature
in its HVS line of switchers that features
a built-in Web server to allow users to adjust
settings from a PC or tablet terminal.

This new display technology gives operators
an advantage, Shinn said. “In front of
a control panel like this, you can give other
people the ability to participate in the
workflow remotely with wireless devices;
you’re not tethered to a wire or a traditional
control panel.”

In general, the professional audio/video
world seems to be adopting to these new
forms of soft/virtual panels faster than the
mainstream broadcast or mobile production
world, Paulsen said. “So I’d expect
broadcast manufacturers to steadily increase
experimentation over time.”

Tapping into the different ways that
operators work was a key component in
building the module-based Snell Kahuna
Maverick control surface, which allows users
to deploy modules in a variety of configurations
depending on desk space. “But
each element of the Maverick still conforms
to the way that people understand a
switcher to work,” said John Carter, senior
product manager for U.K.-based Snell.

What will drive future switcher design?
It’s apt to be a push from the creative, a push
back from the technical and a demand from
operators that regardless of the final design,
the technology will respond as intended.

“I think over the longer term, we’ll break
away from a definite physical set of resources,”
Grass Valley’s Griggs said. “The industry
has stopped doing the indentured training of
technical people. It would be nice to think
that even for our larger switchers, we have
a new creative paradigm to suit people who
are in our industry today.”

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The FAA’s current rules and proposed ban on flight over people, requirement of visual line of sight and restriction on nighttime flying, effectively prohibit broadcasters from using UAS for newsgathering. ~ WMUR-TV General Manager Jeff Bartlett